The necessity for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has recently received a great deal of attention due to factors such as shortening of the product life as varieties of products are produced, and customer's orientation to customized services as the use of the Internet spreads. These methods try to raise customer satisfaction, win new customers, and keep existing customers.
One-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing which creates a database of individual attribute information including the age, gender, hobbies, preferences, and purchase log of a customer, analyzes the contents of the database, and makes a proposal complying with the customer's needs. A typical method of this marketing is variable printing. These days, a variable printing system which customizes a document for each customer and outputs the document has been developed along with the development of DTP (Desk Top Publishing) techniques and the proliferation of digital printing apparatuses. The variable printing system needs to create a customized document in which contents different for respective customers are laid out.
Generally, when such a customized document is to be created by the variable printing system, containers are laid out in a document. The container is a drawing region for drawing contents (e.g., an image and text), and is also called a field region.
A desired customized document (called a document template) can be created by laying out containers in a document and associating a database with the layout (associating various contents in the database with the containers). The contents of the customized document can be changed (made variable) by properly switching contents in the containers in the customized document for each record in the database. Such a document is called a variable data document, and a print system using the variable data document is a variable printing system. As a method of creating a variable printing template, a form creation application has conventionally been proposed (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-222493).
In a conventional variable printing system, the size of a container associated with a text or image serving as contents is fixed. When contents in the database are inserted (flowed) into a container and the data amount is larger than the container size, the following problems arise. If the data is text, overlapping of the text occurs. If the data is an image, clipping of the image by the container occurs, and part of the image is lost. When the data amount is smaller than the container size, no proper display may be obtained as a gap appears between the perimeter of the container and its internal contents.
There is also known a technique of, when a text to be inserted into a container of a fixed container size cannot be fully fitted in the container, changing (in this case, reducing) the font size of the text to display all the text in the container.
However, if a container enlarges in accordance with contents to be inserted in an environment where the container size is flexible, the container overlaps another container in the same document. If the data amount of text to be inserted is excessively large in an environment where the font size is flexible, the font size is reduced excessively.
As another automatic layout technique which solves these problems, a “Layout Designing Apparatus” is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-48216. In this reference, when the data amount to be inserted into a given container (image component block) becomes large, the layout position of the next container (image component block) to be laid out is changed. If data cannot be fully inserted in a container, it is moved to the next container (image component block) to be laid out.
In the conventional variable printing system, a multi-record technique of laying out multiple records in one document is also known in addition to a technique of laying out one record in one document. The multi-record technique makes it possible to change the number of laid-out data for one customer, and to create a document customized for each customer.
In, however, the variable printing system disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-48216, the layout order is determined in advance as an order of data to be flowed. The layout is decided by laying out data one by one in accordance with the layout order. If the data amount to be flowed is large (the data size of each data is large), data of a low layout order is assigned with a small layout region and may not be laid out.
In order to solve this problem, a dynamic layout system has been devised. The dynamic layout system flexibly sets the container size of a container laid out in a document, and links (associates) flexibly set containers to each other. With this setting, the linked containers push each other and make their loads equal, deciding the container positions and sizes. Software which implements the dynamic layout system can change the size of each container in accordance with the relationship between each container and the data amount inserted into the container.
In the dynamic layout system, it is devised to provide a function of defining layouts (product name, image, specifications, and the like) for one product as an organized template (to be referred to as a subtemplate hereinafter) in advance, like creating a layout for a product brochure or the like.
However, in the dynamic layout system for the variable printing system, only one partial layout area is devised for one template. That is, no single record can be divided and laid out in a plurality of partial layout areas on the same page. It is difficult to implement a division layout in which one record is divided into a set of product images and a set of specification tables.
When a plurality of partial layout areas are set on the same page, contents are sequentially laid out in containers defined in the respective partial layout areas. On the same page, contents of three records may be laid out in the first partial layout area, whereas contents of four records may be laid out in the second partial layout area. If contents of a set of product images and those of a set of specification tables are laid out in separate partial layout areas, the contents of the product images and those of the specification tables may be misaligned with each other.